Indiana Grain Company, LLC

Posted: 02/19/10

By: tomgrisafi

Corn buyers in South Korea are “very concerned” about the quality of U.S. supplies, said Park Yong, the Chicago-based chief market analyst for CJ Corp., the nation’s biggest food processor.

“We’re worried that the U.S. doesn’t have enough capacity to dry up its crop,” Yong said today in an interview from an agricultural conference in Arlington, Virginia. Wet Midwest weather last year slowed harvesting and kept standing corn from drying. Some Korean millers are looking for grain from Brazil and Argentina, he said. “Fungal disease is a major concern.”

Some millers are also renegotiating contracts with U.S. suppliers to buy higher-grade grain, Yong said. “We’re definitely very concerned about the quality issue, and we want to know how much bad-quality corn there is.”

Corn-futures contracts will fall as U.S. farmers rush to sell supplies of lower quality before the next harvest starts in September, Yong said. The grain is more likely to trade around $3.30 a bushel than $4, he said. CJ, based in Seoul, imports more than 3 million metric tons of corn, soybeans, wheat and sugar annually, he said.

Source: Bloomberg

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